The fun of open source

Even when most of the time the source code for open source projects used is not needed it might come handy whenever problems occur. This is just one example I recently stumbled upon.

For my German blog over at nosilverbullet.de[2] I use Roller as the blog engine. Being a lazy person I did not bother to design a theme for myself. So I went over to roller.dev.java.net[3] and downloaded the theme collection. Of these the theme "rational" was the one I chose for my blog.

Testing the theme on my development box I surprisingly noticed that I wasn't able to post comments. Of course I looked for the reason at all the wrong places. I downloaded the roller sources, added logging code to some of the Java-code, checked the database-tables and generally did some finding and grepping on the source base.

Well actually the solution was pretty easy. It was a simple bug in the view code, in the Weblog.vm (the Velocity template responsible for displaying the blog entries).

So this is what I like about open source, being able to look at the source. For the vast majority of projects I use, I have never actually done this. But I want to be able to do so, if the need occurs.